Of the 166 inmates of Guantanamo Bay, 86 are being detained
without trial and in some cases without charge. Some of these men have been
detained for as long as 11 years. They are desperate. They are also men who
take their religion seriously and, this being the holy month of Ramadan, they
expect to be allowed to fast during daylight hours. They are also on hunger
strike. So they are force fed at night.
By force feeding their Muslim prisoners at night the captors are presumably making some sort of perverse point
about respecting the freedom of religion which is enshrined in the first
amendment to their own constitution. Under that constitution, The United States of America also purports to be one nation under God. When the constitution was originally
drawn up, this meant that the United States understood itself to be
a Christian nation. Assuming this still holds true, as a Christian nation it is
bound in a familial sense to all other Christian nations. This means that if it
is to be faithful to the Gospel of Christ as a
Christian nation, it is responsible to the Christians of those
other nations, in other words to the Church.
We understand the Church to mean the body of Christ and we
understand from Christ, and from the
letters of St. Paul, that the body needs all of its members in order to
function in a healthy way. Where members behave in ways which are completely at
odds with the spirit of Christ’s gospel, such as detaining people for
inordinate lengths of time without charge and torturing them, the body acquires
the symptoms of a human body which is in the very last stages of decay. The
practice of torture is the equivalent of gangrene. It is ugly and lethal.
Torture employed as part of a nation’s routine practice for
dealing with the suspected threat of terrorism, also infects the very people it
is trying to punish or keep at bay because torture breeds hatred and hatred breeds
violence. Both are fuelled by fear. So both torture and terrorism are practices
which justify themselves to each other. They have a twisted logic of their own
because each in their different way justifies the person who believes that
violence is the only option left to them.
Terrorism is born of despair and despair comes when all
efforts to protect the dignity and rights of other members of the body have
been exhausted or ignored. It is also worth mentioning that these rights include the rights of women and girls
to freedom and education, but women and girls are often themselves the victims of
both terrorism and torture. They are seldom the perpetrators of either. The murder of innocent civilians by
terrorists is the other face of torture. It is born of the idea that violence
done to one group of people automatically exonerates them of the violence they
do in retaliation. Such is the stuff of conflict situations today and of torture done in the name of ‘security’.
Religion and faith matter today more than they have ever
done. What we are seeing in Guantanamo Bay is the effect of the inability of
men and women of good faith to be a strong and unified voice in calling for an
end to all the torture and violence that is perpetrated, whether overtly or covertly, in their name.
It is time Christians and Muslims who wish to be true to their core faith, to
Christ’s gospel of peace and to a merciful God, to work together effectively to
put an end to the violence which is being done in their names.
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